As a Canadian, as a Torontonian (well, 905er, close enough), I can tell you that only the stupidest, most right-wing hicks in the country even bother to give Blatchford the time of day. Don't paint us all with the same brush.

Don't bother sending her a letter, by the way. I don't think she's really literate; probably just grunts into a tape recorder and forces some staff peon to type it up for her.

It's because of similar legal bullshit that I haven't created an app for my WinMo phone that shows the bus schedules in my area. Crown copyright is enthusiastically supported by all levels of government here in Canada, too, despite being useless.

More people are at risk of having their lives changed through the action of drunk drivers. With elections, it's not like changing one group of criminals for another will really change all that much for people, so it's less important for voting machines.

The situation in Canada is technologically similar, but we're simmering up here because the industry politics make things just so much more bitter.

I don't care about paying $.10 to $.20 per text message, so much as I care about the services I use and like to stay connected to when I'm mobile can't stay connected to me. Because our telcos are billing both sides at near extortionary rates (causing Twitter to shut down outgoing SMS messages, and probably also keeping Brightkite from wanting to get an SMS gateway working for Canadians) and the fact that two of the three now charge for all incoming texts, even if they're spam, really just cuts open a wound and dumps a bag of road salt on it.

It may be much ado about nothing in the States, where you actually have some semblance of competition in your mobile telco market, but here in Canada, we're getting straight-up fucked.

When I was a teen, I was in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets. In those days, cadets would more often than not wear combat uniforms, as the solid olive green uniforms were easily purchased and manufactured even for the public.

Since the older combat uniforms were replaced with the IP law protected CADPAT design, most cadet corps now tend to simply drill around a lot in their dress uniforms. As older, used CADPAT uniforms turn up in surplus stores, things may change back to how it used to be, but given that uniforms for cadets have to be the same as those used by the Canadian Forces, the possibility of independently manufacturing and selling CATPATs is nil, due to the protection around the design.

So seeing this isn't surprising at all for me, or likely any other Canadian with cadets experience.

"A system of government-granted monopolies managed through a centralized government body" is what they want and support? Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, that's called communism. And they're the ones screaming about "socialism"!

High time someone finally decided to take that site to court. But as Matt says, does anyone even bother with Classmates.com anymore? I don't even see their messages anymore, having blocked them out as spammers, and with practically everyone (but not their pets or imaginary friends) on Facebook anyway, for free, I can't imagine anyone but the most weak-minded actually putting any time and effort into that site.